Language Dominance and Lexical Diversity: How Bilinguals and L2 Learners Differ in their Knowledge and Use of French Lexical and Functional Items

Abstract

From the psycholinguistic literature we know that monolinguals and bilinguals differ from each other in how they process language and that bilinguals can therefore not be seen as two monolinguals in one person (Grosjean, 1997, p. 167). We also know that perfect bilinguals are extremely rare and that most bilinguals are dominant in one or the other language (Fishman, 1971; Grosjean, 1997; Romaine, 1995). Therefore, there are probably important differences between bilinguals in the command they have of their languages, depending on the frequency with which they use each language, and the purposes for which they need them. As Grosjean (1998) has pointed out, there is a lot of confusion around the concept of bilinguals, and researchers use widely differing operationalizations of this concept. Few researchers attempt to assess the knowledge bilinguals have of either language in any detail, although it is legitimate to question how one can differentiate between different types of bilinguals or between bilinguals and second language learners. Some researchers are reluctant to engage in precise assessments of bilinguals’ proficiency profiles because this often leads to negative views of bilinguals or L2 users (see Cook, 1997a on the monolingual bias that is built into second language acquisition (SLA) research). Obtaining precise information about the proficiency of bilinguals is, however, important because language proficiency has an impact on language processing and thus it affects bilinguals’ performance on lexical decision tasks or any other tasks that involve informants’ language-processing mechanisms.

I am very grateful to Alex Housen for making the L2 learner data from Aalst available on the FLLOC database, to Xu Ziyan for collecting the data from the Paris group, to John and Françoise Tidball for transcribing the data of the Paris group, to the Research Committee of Faculty of HLSS for sponsoring my sabbatical leave and the costs of the data collection in Brussels in 2006, to the Research Fund of School of LLAS for sponsoring the transcription of the Paris data set, to Florence Myles and Annabelle David for giving me the French POST programme and to Michael H. Daller and Brian Richards for comments on earlier versions and advice on statistical issues.